It's a blessing in the sense that there was an amazing amount of resources. It's both a curse and a blessing to be writing about a recent historical event.

And that's a novelist's dream, if you find a character like that. He's so desperate to belong to a family, he's willing to put himself in that position. people in the center of an intersection in a circle locked in chains and pipes, waiting for the cops to come to clear the street.

He's so desperate to belong somewhere that he's willing to join these protests without any training and put himself into the most vulnerable of positions - which was 'lockdown'. he's estranged from his father, he's lost his mother and he's really looking for a family. is a 19-year-old, biracial son of the chief of police who has run away, traveled the world and now he's back in Seattle. On his character Victor, a young man who shows up hoping to sell drugs to the protestors She has a wound on her forehead and I just thought: Wow, why is this woman here? What world are we living in that she's protesting for the rights of someone who makes shoes in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka? She has long red hair, she's on her knees. I came across a picture of a woman on the streets in the protest. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. 'What I wanted to do was sort of unpack the soundbite that we hear all too often: 'Violent Protesters Clash With Police,'' he says.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist Author Sunil Yapa Yapa decided to reimagine this story of protest and police. Yapa's novel arrives just as the country is in the midst of a presidential campaign that's often focused on trade deals, big corporations and other features of globalization - a lot of the same issues people were protesting back in 1999.

'Here's a moment that we forgot about, or got lost in the news cycle that I think was a very important moment in American history,' Yapa tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. Badly outnumbered police resorted to using tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist was inspired by a real-life event in 1999, thousands of demonstrators disrupted a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. This second version has turned into a newly published novel about recurring themes in American history. Yapa summoned the will to write it all over again - but a little shorter this time. When Sunil Yapa's laptop was stolen, he didn't just lose his computer - he also lost the 600-page novel saved on it. He says his father, who was a consultant for the World Bank, instilled in him a sense of 'the world being an interconnected place.' Novelist Sunil Yapa has lived all around the globe, including in Chile, China, Greece, Guatemala, Argentina and India.

Your heart is a muscle book